In theory, yes. In practice, they are a niche endeavor used by a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds.
Lemmy is constantly mentioned in these discussions as an open source, federated Reddit alternative, yet the largest Lemmy instance has 1500 monthly active users. That's... nothing. There are tens of thousands of individual subreddits bigger than that. The "Fediverse" isn't going anywhere.
The Internet is not moving towards open communication protocols, it's moving away from them.
There are anti-spam measures that don't require locking down protocols. Ideally, a user's feed would only consist of message boards they subscribe to. Similarly, message boards could limit posting to subscribed users, approved users, paying users, or those users with a "certificate" proving their human - the latter would be akin to certificate authorities we have today who assign certificates to websites.
> It's generally not in the interest of commercial providers to use open protocols.
Not to derail, but that's the capitalist's contradiction: a capitalist points to competition as a theoretical advantage of capitalism, but then in practice does everything to eliminate it.
Of course. Locking down protocols is never required. It's being done because it benefits the largest service providers by restricting their users' ability to move elsewhere. You're acting as if the status quo is an unfortunate situation that can be resolved by giving service providers the necessary technologies to interoperate. The exact opposite is the case. Service providers are actively undermining open protocols (EEE). They are very much aware that federation is possible, and they do not want it.
I agree which is why it will take a 501(c)(3) non-profit to drive the change.
That makes scaling the main instance impractical without redesigning how its built, deployed, secured, and connects to its backend database.
Note also that adding other sites increases this load without adding users as polling for content constantly is likely more expensive than having a user connect directly (and use it for a limited time).
I don't know anything about federation, but what you said basically describes the Internet when it started, so I don't see how you can imagine it is not going anywhere based on that. Most tech starts as a "niche endeavor of a bunch of hackers and computer science nerds" (I'm also thinking of Apple starting at a computer club).